ABSTRACT
Property is one of the central tropes of eighteenth-century public discourse, crucial to debates in public law, political argument, political economy, and moral philosophy. And not property of any and every kind, but a peculiar form of property: property as individual absolute dominion, “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” 1 In this form all the potential sticks in the bundle of property rights are gathered in a single owner, the rights to enjoy and to exploit the owned resources without restriction, to exclude others from access to them for any or no reason, and to alienate them without restraint – all secured by fixed, stable, predictable rules of law against diminution or encroachment. The ideology of property as absolute dominion has, of course, many different sources: Lockean natural rights to appropriation and improvement; the pseudo-medievalism of the ancient Gothic constitution with its “allodial” Saxon tenures; Scottish evolutionary history and political economy, showing separate property emerging at the shepherd’s stage of development, and edging out competing forms of tenure in the commercial stage; or civic humanism, with its independent yeoman freeholders forming the necessary social basis of self-governing republics. Yet in general political rhetoric these very different sources promiscuously intermingle, tending to converge however sloppily in the modal form of property as absolute individual right, the legally guaranteed security of private possession, disposition, and alienation required for individual happiness, self-government, political stability, and economic improvement. This modal form of property as dominion, which as Blackston says “so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind,” is hardly confined to property in land and chattels. It is rapidly and recklessly generalized to intangibles, then to any type of potentially valuable expectancy, and ultimately to public, political rights as well. As John Reid has exhaustively shown in his study of American Revolutionary rhetoric, liberty itself was property. To be free was to have a “freehold” in rights of which one could not be “dispossessed” by arbitrary action, as opposed to being a villein or “tenant at will,” holding, as John Dickinson put it, by “the precarious tenure of the will of others.” 2
